Hot Poppies

by Reggie Nadelson

  “You want my car?” I knew Mike needed a second car bad.

  “What do you mean, want it?”

  “I want to give it to you. It’s in the shop. It’ll be OK in a few days. Do you want it?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  I threw him the keys. “It’s all yours.” I swiped a cheese Danish from the cake stand, waved it at him and went out the door. I ate the pastry in the cab going uptown and gave the driver a twenty for a tip.

  All my life I wanted to do what I did next. It was a red Cadillac. It had creamy leather seats. Pre-owned, they call it. Used, in other words. But this one was a honey; it didn’t have much mileage. I’d seen it before and I had wanted it a lot. When I got to the dealership over on Eleventh Avenue, it was still there.

  The dealer, who had seen me before, didn’t pay much attention to me until I let him see a wedge of money as fat as his arm.

  It had my name on it, this particular car, we agreed, oh, yessir, the salesman dripped sincerity. A slow season, what with the weather, the salesman told me. He could do me an excellent deal. Like I was some kind of high roller, I let the guy see the wad of dough again. He was awed. For cash he could do a very very nice deal, he said, and I could hear him thinking, Geez, in this weather, this is great. He gave me the keys so I could take the red Caddy for a spin.

  Sure, I realized it was a Cadillac and so was the white car in Chinatown. But mine didn’t have wire wheels or hood ornaments. Also, I didn’t care. This much irony I could live with. This was the car I’d wanted for a long, long time. When I was a kid in Moscow, I once saw a red Cadillac in an American exhibition. At night, under the covers, I looked at it in the four-color catalogue. In Moscow, cars came in black. Sometimes gray. The red Caddy looked like America. One day, I thought. One day.

  Shifting my thighs over the leather seats, I drove up the West Side Highway and back down. I watched the sun pop into the water, a gilded orange ball doing a flashy sunset, showering the frozen buildings with gold coins just for me.

  The thing rode like a dream. I tested the surround-sound system with a couple of CDs I brought specially for this purpose, Gershwin playing his own stuff on the piano and a remastered version of Louis Armstrong doing “Potato Head Blues”. The sound was magic, even a tune recorded in 1926 on mono sounded wonderful. I wished I could give Satchmo a ride. George, too. Back at the showroom, I bought the car. For cash.

  I was driving the car, of course, when I pulled up outside Lily’s that evening. She hates it if I’m early and she’s getting dolled up, so I parked and waited, head against the leather headrest, eyes closed, music playing.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw Pete Leung. I saw him saunter out of Lily’s building. Her doorman, José, raised his hat to Pete which meant Pete had tipped him plenty. Saunter was what Pete did. No, it was a swagger. There was a swagger to his walk, a knowing familiarity, a sense he knew his way around the building and had been there before. He climbed into his battered VW that was parked at the curb. I don’t think he saw me, but I saw him, saw him smile into his own rear-view mirror, a self-satisfied little smile. Could be that Pete Leung had other friends in Lily’s building, I thought to myself, but I didn’t believe it.

  17

  Baby Vanelli was dead.

  The pink lipstick that doubled as a knife was under the rug the next morning when we found Babe Vanelli’s body in Lily’s apartment. The blade had some kind of dried mucus on it, along with hairs from the rug and dust from the floor. It must have rolled.

  Babe was dead. Sherm was in jail, but the killing had not stopped. I recognized the scars on Babe’s face; they looked like the tracks I’d seen on Rose. The monsters had been looking for me. Instead, they got Babe Vanelli.

  The night before, after I saw Pete Leung leave Lily’s building, the two of us went to Raoul’s and ate bar steaks and drank a couple of bottles of Cabernet.

  When I asked what she had wanted to talk about, Lily said, “Let’s just have a nice time. Let’s not talk tonight. I’m feeling good now.” I didn’t ask what Pete Leung was doing in her building. I should have asked, but I guess I didn’t want to know.

  Lily stayed at my place and Babe stayed at Lily’s because Babe had a big date Saturday and her heat was still on the fritz. In the morning, Babe was dead.

  The hall table in Lily’s apartment was turned over. A green pottery vase lay shattered on the floor, and the yellow roses I’d sent Lily were broken and scattered. The way Babe was lying on the hall floor, her arm stretched out, her fingers seemed to grasp for the shards of the green jug, and I thought I saw her short, sexy fingers twitch.

  Kneeling on the rug that was soaked with water and Babe’s blood, Lily tried to gather up the flowers. “Why?” She stared at the roses. “Why, Artie?” She sat down on the floor, some of the broken flowers in her hand, shoulders shaking.

  It was a fight, said the cops who arrived. Someone attacked her. She fought back. After the cops, the MEs came, all of them crowding into Lily’s apartment. Babe had probably been strangled.

  Every time the door opened, I saw some of Lily’s neighbors in the hall. Shuffling in their slippers, clutching bathrobes around them, they bent down to pick up the Sunday Times from their doormats and looked up quickly, frightened, furtive, eager to help, more eager to close their doors. Can we help, a few called out, then closed their doors again as fast as it was decent.

  A cop from the Sixth that Lily knew came by to offer his assistance. He swore he’d keep me in touch with the case. I called Sonny Lippert at home and filled him in.

  After everybody who needed to see the body had a turn, Babe Vanelli was zipped into a black bag and taken away. By now, Lily was dry-eyed. She asked me to take her to Babe’s parents on West End Avenue.

  When we got there I said, “Should I come with you?”

  Lily shook her head. “I should tell them myself. I should do that, don’t you think so, Artie? You go find the piece of shit who did it, OK? You find him. I think I should go alone,” she said, and I watched Lily get into the elevator and the doors close.

  It didn’t take long to put it together. The guy from the Sixth was as good as his word. Babe’s date had not flown in from the coast the night before. Instead, she had phoned an actor named Dirk. She told him she was free. Dirk and Babe spent the evening together.

  All this we learned from Dirk because Dirk called the cops as soon as he heard about Babe on the local news. His story checked out. I checked it. I promised Lily.

  Dirk spent the evening with Babe at Lily’s place and around one a.m. he got a cab and headed for his apartment on Hudson Street. Before he went upstairs, he ran into a friend in a deli on Sixth, talked to the deli man, bought bagels and the Sunday Times. José, Lily’s doorman, is a fat fuck but an honest witness, if you give him some cash, and José said Babe had buzzed him to get Dirk a cab after midnight. José saw Dirk get into it. Dirk himself said Babe was pretty stoned when he left her. She might have opened the door, thinking he had left something behind or that he had come back for more, Dirk said. Not a sensitive man exactly, but he didn’t kill her. The pieces all fit.

  The time of death, after they got finished wrangling about angles and cuts and semen and blood, was put at roughly three in the morning. One of Lily’s neighbors reported that, when she took her dogs out around six on Sunday morning, the basement door was unlocked. Except for tenants with a key, there’s no access to and from the basement from the alley that runs alongside the building but, what with the lousy weather, people used it as a shortcut to the lobby. Someone forgot to lock up.

  Later that day, a Chinese kid wandered into Beekman Hospital with a hole in his eye. Someone had stuck the kid in the eye with a weapon that turned out to be a lot like Babe’s knife-in-a-lipstick. It didn’t take long to make a preliminary match. Tissue on the knife appeared to be similar to the eye tissue. I called Eljay Koplin’s brother, Dick, who’s a brilliant eye doctor, and he asked me was there any vitreous material on the knife, any of the iris
? “Ask,” he said, then added it didn’t really matter because it was the DNA that counted.

  The pain was worse than the fear, which was why the kid showed up at the hospital. When I saw him, I hoped Baby had done it; I hoped, before she died, she stuck the knife in his eye as hard as hell. I hoped he suffered and would keep on suffering and, after that, we would fry him.

  He lay on the bed connected by a bunch of tubes to various drips while Jerry and me, we stood and looked at the creature, this lousy specimen of a human, the eye and part of the head huge with bandages. This was the man who killed Babe and now he lay here, dope running into his veins to stave off the pain.

  Chen looked at the plastic pouch that hung over his head. “I’d like to pull the fucking drip,” he said. “Let him feel the fucking pain.” He peered into the bandaged face, then turned to me. “You think it’s him, Art? You think it’s the animal that fucked with you in the freight elevator? That killed Rose? A motherfucker with a five-sided spike he likes to throw around?”

  Black and red stubble showed on one side of his head. If it was him, he moved fast. He was everywhere: the warehouse where I was attacked, the street where he went at Chen, Henry Liu’s. Or maybe there were more of them, him, the other one, four, six, a hundred. Creatures who moved through the urban jungle, heads full of beeper numbers, area codes, the names of girls who owed money and could be kidnapped or extorted.

  Sherm Abramsky was dragged in to look at him and he didn’t hesitate. “One of the errand boys. He brought me lists of names. Of girls. Names. He was a gofer.”

  “You’re sure? Even with the bandages?”

  “Sure.”

  “The only one?”

  “Recently,” Sherm said. “Recently it was usually him.”

  If Sonny Lippert was right about Sherm—if Sherm had not killed Rose—then this was her killer.

  “He’s awake,” Chen said.

  Chen took over. In spite of it being Sunday, a translator was produced. The translator said the man’s name was Wai Ng Cho, but he was known as Wayne. Wayne was Fujianese. He wouldn’t talk.

  Chen turned to Wayne. “We already got your pal, he already identified you. Make life easy on yourself.”

  The translator talked. Wayne replied briefly, then shifted his body, tried to move his bandaged head, emitted a moan of pain.

  “He says, OK, he killed one woman. Rose. It was her name.”

  I thought to myself, how come he’s so helpful all of a sudden?

  “He says he did it because he was bored. He was bored with ugly women, so he killed Rose.”

  “He’s covering for someone,” Chen said, but I knew different. I knew it was him. I knew because no one had mentioned Rose’s name except him. And no one said she was ugly. It was him. “Why don’t we strangle the ugly one?” This was the monster who had kidnapped Pansy and Rose, who raped them and beat them in the dank garage. Then he killed Rose and the child she was carrying. Then Babe Vanelli. He had killed and killed and killed.

  “Why the fuck’s he so eager to volunteer he did in Rose?” Chen said.

  “Did he kill the woman by the skating rink?” I asked the translator.

  “He says no, perhaps someone else.”

  “Someone who?”

  “He forgot the name.”

  “Who does he work for? Ask him.”

  “He won’t say.”

  “Make him say!” I was screaming now.

  “I want her to look at him,” Chen said.

  “Who?”

  “You know who.” He pushed me out of the room. In the corridor, where I could hear the squish of rubber soles on the linoleum of the hospital floor, Chen offered me a cigarette.

  “Leave her be, Jerry. Not in the hospital. I don’t want her here. Wait until he’s locked up, for Chrissake.”

  “Fuck you, Artie Cohen. Pansy knows stuff she doesn’t tell us. I want her now. I want her here.” He looked at his watch. “Vanelli was your friend, remember, Art. Remember. Get Pansy for me. She won’t talk to me. You get her.”

  “What makes you think she wants to help us?”

  “I don’t know. She likes you. Maybe she wants to fuck you. Why do you think? She wants to help. Some of them actually want to help, you know. They got guts. Some are OK. Like you and me,” he added. “Like you, anyway.” He snickered and I could hear the gurgle of bile. “Did you know Pete Leung left town, by the way?”

  “So.”

  “I just thought you’d like to know. I thought you might like to know his wife went with him. You think I don’t know you spent the night with Pete’s wife? Well, good for you, man. I never did like him either, but I bet he was pretty agitated. It’s OK, Art, I kept my fucking mouth shut. So you’ll get Pansy for me, won’t you? I’m relying on you. If you don’t fucking care about the others, do it for Vanelli, for Chrissake.”

  “If I do this, you let me talk to her. And you give her some actual promise of protection. You make good on it. If I decide.”

  Jerry said, “That’s a deal.”

  It was Jerry Chen who put some doubts in my mind about the turd in the hospital with the hole in his eye. That he, the turd who called himself Wayne, had killed I could believe. That he was the errand boy for some enforcer was evident. I was sure he had done all the worst shit you ever thought of in your life. What I didn’t believe was that it was Wayne who spooked me at the edge of the pier two nights before. I didn’t believe it was him who asked for me by name at Mike Rizzi’s or that he was trying to fuck with my head.

  Of all the possibilities in this grisly business, only Jerry Chen was a real enigma. I looked at Chen in the hospital corridor. His back was to me, head thrown against the wall, eyes closed while he puffed a cigarette. This guy lived at the intersection of ambition and self-loathing, and he was obsessed with a woman who used him. I didn’t know how, yet. Jerry Chen had something Coco wanted. Not just sex. Something else. I was betting there was money involved and lots of it. Only Chen was crafty enough to play mind games with me, and for what? To scare me off? To get me off the case? In some convoluted way, did he figure if I got scared enough by Chinatown, if he scared me enough, I’d get Pansy for him? And if she testified, would that be it? There would always be something he wanted, some bigger fish to fry, some bigger collar to make.

  I looked at him in the glare of the hospital lights.

  “Jerry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing.”

  The apartment on West End Avenue was dark and the Pressmans, Babe’s parents, seemed to have inhabited it for a hundred years. Lily opened the door for me. I shook hands with Mr and Mrs Pressman, who were small and old and sat together, side by side, on a brown settee in the living room. On the floor next to them sat Babe’s sister. She was smoking cigarettes and tearing up Kleenex.

  After I ate a chopped liver sandwich and drank some Canadian Club, Lily took me into an empty bedroom. She looked out of the window.

  “Suddenly, I hate the fucking snow.” Lily sat on a narrow bed covered with a salmon-colored spread. She picked at the nubby fabric and examined the cotton threads she extracted from it.

  “We got him,” I said.

  “Why, Artie? Why? Things like this don’t happen. They don’t happen.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why, but I’ll find out, I promise. I’m sorry,” I said. “I really liked Babe. She was something else.”

  Lily’s face was wet. Taking her bag off the bed, she held it against her chest as if for comfort and rocked back and forth. “She’s dead is all that matters anyway. She was my best friend for thirty years,” she said.

  “Talk to me.”

  “No. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  “We need to talk. Your apartment’s not safe. They might have been looking for you. Or me.” I reached for her, but she drew back.

  “No, Artie. This is not a replay of you and Ricky Tae. This isn’t yours. It’s mine. I don’t want to talk about it, Artie. I’m not blaming you. I j
ust need to get on with things.”

  “Stay with me. Stay with me at my place.”

  “I have to tell you something. Close the door, OK?” she said and I closed it. “There’s not a chance in hell they’ll release the body, is there? There can’t be a funeral tomorrow like the Pressmans want, can there? Even if they’re religious and they need it, it won’t happen, will it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I talked to Babe’s sister. She said Baby would want me to go on with things.”

  “I’m sure she would. I’m sure. What things?”

  “I want a child, Artie. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m not sentimental. I just know I missed some boat that I want to get on. I’m too old, but I don’t care. It’s something I have to do.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m going to adopt a child, Artie. I mean I’m adopting one. It’s happening.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did tell you. I tried. I tried, but you weren’t listening.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. I’m going away to get her. To China.”

  I looked at Lily and thought, what if I lose her again? What if I fucked up and she went away? Maybe this was what it was like to discover you were in love with someone and it was too late, that you left it too late.

  “We could have a kid. We could. Two if you want. Our own. I could go to law school, like we said.” I cranked the enthusiasm up until I almost believed it was real.

  Lily smiled. “Thanks, Artie. But it’s not who you are and I don’t want you to be what you’re not. I like you too much. A cop is who you are. For you, it’s the most interesting thing in the world. You don’t want a child. It ties you down, you know. It’s why I never did it. There was always a job, a story. You have to get up in the middle of the night. But thank you for asking.”